If this site actually provided privacy-preserving recommendations, there are many of us in the U.S. who would (or should?) also be interested in these services. Sadly, this is SPAM.

"At the time, MySQL existed ..."

You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed much tougher to manage but more full-featured.

Really, you've always had to be careful with MySQL. It really was the PHP of RDBMSs.

The silent "SHOW WARNINGS" system, nonsense dates like Feb 31, implicit type conversions like converting strings to 0s, non-deterministic group by enabled by default, index corruption, etc.

Good enough for Wordpress.

We are circling back to PHP, aren't we?

Not just constraints, transactions were also a no-op. The MyISAM engine is still available in modern versions if you want to experience this, it's just not default anymore.

Yep, I've had to work with a MyISAM project with no transactions - it's a reasonably simple system thank goodness but a little scary all the same (and lots of boilerplate to deal with partial failures).

I love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.

mysql was great in 2000 if you knew all the foot guns to avoid and set it up correctly (and not just what sounded correct).

Not to mention there was Percona, and both Google & Facebook contributed a number of patches that made monitoring MySQL top notch (such as finding slow running queries, unused indexes, locks etc.).

Too late ...

That is very close to a half-length shipping container.

HN as a tabloid ... After all enquiring minds want to know!

I was part of Omaze and can definitely empathize with the amount of work charitable fund raising takes and the amount of heartache that come from seeing under needs. Thanks for your hard work!

Great article and it really takes me back to my past! I was fortunate enough to always have a VM700 or equivalent to assess the quality of my modulators but one low channel isn't it of reach. One quibble with:

> After realizing that broadcast television uses negative modulation ...

NTSC is actually vestigial side-band so while it's easy to notice the modulation below the carrier, the low frequencies which include the sync information are also present above the carrier with the effect of having twice the modulated power.

Here's the one I use a lot ... And the underlying `glamour` library is great for programmatic markdown display: https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow.

Same, and I also run them on CI. It's just handy as a check runner.